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Peter Fenzel has never seen The Sound of Music. But Mark Lee has been to see a live production of it recently, so Pete watches it with Mark and Matthew Wrather, and finds in it a latent conflict between Prussian vs Austrian values, a gendered allegory of domination in the political and domestic sphere, and a delightful meal of Schnitzel with Noodles.
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Further Reading
- “No Way To Stop It” (a song from the stage musical; not in the film)
- Countries holding territory that once belonged to the Habsburg Dynasty (Imgur)
- Historical Lectures from The National WWI Museum (YouTube)
If I may be so bold, a good counterpoint to The Sound of Music is the 2019 Terrance Malik Film A Hidden Life, which details the life of an Austrian farmer who declines to swear allegiance to Hilter and also refuses to fight for the Nazis. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well. To me, the film mostly serves as a piece of anthropology about how “ordinary” Austrians lived in the time leading up to and during World War II.